The (Unofficial) Armin Protection Squad
by Aingeal98
Summary: Armin always assumed that the bullying he experienced as a child would get worse when he joined the military, but for some reason, he rarely got picked on. Add that to the wary attitude the trainees had around him, and something wasn't right.


Armin was no stranger to being bullied. Until he'd made friends with Eren getting beat up was a regular part of his life, and even after he made friends with Eren the bullying only lessened a little until Mikasa showed up.

Being helpless and relying on others to constantly save him had not helped Armin's self-esteem. His confidence when joining the military was practically zero and it didn't help that he was surrounded by boys much bigger and stronger than him, some who leered at him with a nasty look in their eyes.

If there was one thing Armin knew, it was that he was smart. He didn't really find it as useful or as valuable as Eren and Mikasa kept insisting, but his intelligence was the one thing he had.

So he was smart enough to know that a weakling like him joining the military would only add to the bullying he received. He was determined to push through it though; it didn't matter if they picked on him every single day, he refused to be a burden to his friends.

Except oddly enough, he hardly ever got picked on.

Now, Armin was smart. Armin was smart enough to know that the bullying should not have stopped, and that something must be going on, but he couldn't for the life of him figure out what.

In his first week as a trainee, he thought he had it all sussed out. There were four massive skinheads who looked at him like wild animals confronted with fresh meat. He could already tell that these would be his tormentors, and when they cornered him behind the bathroom and kicked the shit out of him, he at least had the satisfaction of knowing he was right.

It still hurt like hell, and Eren and Mikasa's concerned looks did nothing to help. He mumbled some excuse about a training accident, and judging from the look they shared neither of them bought his story. It didn't matter to him, as long as he didn't tell them names they wouldn't get in trouble on his behalf.

The next day Armin almost had a heart attack when one of the bullies tripped him in front of Eren and Mikasa. He ignored the laughter of the trainees to look at his friends, fearful that they understood this wasn't an isolated incident. Thankfully, Eren was glaring at the laughing bystanders, while Mikasa was simply staring at Armin in concern.

They thought it was an accident. He would have smiled if his face didn't hurt so much.

The next day, there was an actual accident. The four trainees who'd been picking on him had all gotten their wires tangled during a training exercise, and their injuries were so bad that two of them were in critical condition and two of them would never walk again.

Armin thought that maybe he should feel sorry for them, but all he felt was relief. As they watched the four bullies being carted off, he had to stop himself from cheering. Beside him, Eren and Mikasa both watched stoically as the wagon left the training ground.

That was slightly odd. Normally Eren got unsettled at the sight of his fellow trainees suffering. But it had been a long day, so he was probably just tired.

For about two weeks, Armin avoided getting picked on, but he knew that there had to be more than four bullies in this camp. Sure enough, someone soon decided to continue his torment.

The next kid to try something was a rich girl from the inner walls. On her own she wasn't impressive, but thanks to her status she'd formed a gang of thuggish trainees ready to do her bidding. When Armin scored higher than her on an important test, she set her boys on him. While Eren and Mikasa were in the dining hall, they ruined his textbooks and pushed his face in the mud. They left him crying in the dirt, praying that no one would see him like this.

Mikasa found him, and he could barely bring himself to look at her, knowing what a pitiful sight he was. She gently helped him up and brought him back to her dormitories. As if it couldn't get worse, they passed Eren on the way back.

"Hey guy- Armin! What happened?"

He stared at the ground, unwilling to admit his own weakness.

"You know what never mind. I, uh… I have an extra training session with Shadis so I'll see you guys later. You can tell me then, yeah?"

Armin nodded and smiled up at Eren, relieved that he wasn't being pushy. Eren took off while Mikasa brought him to her dorm, where she carefully cleaned his wounds, bandaged him up, and helped him salvage what he could from his textbooks.

At one point, Armin thought he heard a scream coming from outside, but Mikasa didn't look up from where she was cleaning mud off his maths book, so he assumed it must have been a bird.

The next day, Armin heard the news. The girl was gone.

No one seemed to know what exactly had happened. Whether she had dropped out, been kicked out or died was a mystery. He still hadn't seen Eren, which made him a little suspicious.

He interrogated Reiner about it while he and Mikasa were getting lunch.

"Eren? Yeah, his extra training with Shadis went on for way too long. I heard he spent all night practising in the trees. He's too obsessed, pushing himself like that."

For some reason, Reiner seemed to be nervously staring over Armin's shoulder while he said this. Armin turned around, but the only person behind him was Mikasa.

Weird.

His words almost sounded scripted, but Reiner had no reason to lie to him. Eren had just been training, and this was simply Armin's paranoid imagination acting up.

Anyway, thanks to Reiner, Armin now knew that Eren had no part in the girl's disappearance. Not that he thought Eren would kill her, but both his friends could be a little overprotective. It was a good thing he hid the bullying, or who knows what they would have done to that girl.

For the next few months Armin's life was blissfully bully-free. The training was still gruelling, and the instructor's tough-love method of teaching did nothing to help his confidence, but he was still happy he'd stopped getting regularly tormented.

There was one incident with a substitute instructor who thought that toughening him up required making him run until he dropped and then grinding Armin's face in the dirt with his boot. Armin spent the whole day fretting about dealing with the instructor again, and not even collecting wild herbs with Mikasa had eased his anxiety. But the next day he found out that the instructor had come down with a case of bad food poisoning. Apparently it was severe enough that he was sent away from camp, which meant that Armin was, once again, no longer being picked on.

He used this time to branch out and make closer friends. For some reason a lot of the trainees seemed wary when he tried to talk to them, which was funny considering how physically unimpressive he looked. But eventually they warmed up to him, and soon he was on good terms with most of the cadets.

He still didn't understand why they'd been so afraid of him to begin with, but oh well, they were friends now and that's all that mattered.

It was when a new batch of trainees came that it started again. Six guys, all big and beefy. For some reason they seemed almost cautious around Armin at first, so he thought that maybe they'd heard stories about the bad luck of his other bullies. Armin himself was beginning to think he had some kind of guardian angel.

Other than his two best friends of course, because there was no way what happened to his bullies was their doing.

So yeah, six guys this time. At first they didn't do anything to harm him, but on their third day in camp two of them flanked him during a running exercise.

"You're Armin right? Kind of a dumb name."

The other boy laughed, and Armin kept his eyes on the ground.

"Hey, so there's a rumour going around that you're actually a girl. Is it true? Are your tits just really small? Aw, don't cry girlie, I'm sure you'll hit puberty eventually."

So it went on, until the exercise ended. Thankfully, it was hot enough that Armin's tears could be mistaken for sweat, but that encounter still left him shaken. They hadn't even touched him and they'd hurt him.

They repeated this day in day out, whispering 'he-she' while Armin was waiting in line at the cafeteria, jeering at him when he failed to maneuver through the trees, flanking him during the jogs and hikes so that he'd be forced to listen to their insults.

To an outsider, it just looked like Armin had made new friends. Eren grinned every time he saw them together, and Armin even saw Mikasa smile when one of the boys gave him a slap on the back. She thought it was meant as encouragement, Armin knew it was anything but.

Armin held out for a good few weeks, but the final straw came during a sunny afternoon when he took a nap in his bunk. Everyone else was outside enjoying the good weather, but the heat just made Armin sleepy, so he decided to take advantage of the empty dorm and get some shuteye.

He woke to the sound of snipping. Opening his eyes, he saw something shiny and metallic above him.

Scissors.

He pushed up and screamed, coming face to face with a sneering pimply boy. He reached for his head, and watched in horror as clumps of his blond hair fell loosely into his palms.

"Look freak, we decided to give you a makeover! Now you look like a real boy."

Armin wanted to give some snarky retort, to punch them all in the face, to _hurt them._ But his throat was closing up and he felt tears in his eyes so he pushed past them and ran for the door. Their jeering laughter followed him as he ran all the way to the other side of the training ground, which he knew was the prime sunbathing spot.

He ignored the shocked and surprised looks on the other trainees' faces, his eyes scanning the group for two people in particular. Unlike the others, there was no pity in their eyes. Eren and Mikasa just looked focused, and angry.

They brought him to the bathroom, and Eren held his hand while Mikasa cut his hair into a more even style. It was still long, but parts of it were uneven and jagged despite Mikasa's best efforts. Eventually, Armin stopped crying, and merely stared numbly into the mirror.

"Armin." Eren's voice was quiet and dangerous. "Who did this to you?"

He shook his head, back and forth and back and forth while they stared at him with nothing but love and concern. He didn't deserve it. He was too weak, too pathetic. He had done nothing to earn a place by their side. His messy, uneven hair was just more physical proof of his own shortcomings.

Eren squeezed his hand, and despite his self-deprecating thoughts Armin squeezed back.

"Come on Armin; let's go back to the dorm."

"It's getting late." Mikasa said, staring out at the fading light. "I'll see you two tomorrow. Come to the girls' dorm if you need anything."

Armin barely noticed her leave. He didn't notice the look she and Eren shared, nor did he notice the deadly purpose in her walk. He felt so numb, like Eren's hand in his was the only thing tethering him to reality.

They reached the thankfully-empty dorm, and Armin curled up in Eren's bunk. Eren immediately lay down beside him, and they tugged the blankets around them like they were just children having a sleepover.

"Tell me about the outside world." Eren whispered.

So Armin did.

He talked and talked, until his breathing evened out and he started to feel more alive. He told Eren about the ocean, about the miles and miles of saltwater. He talked about the volcanoes and the fire water that sprung from them. He explained how the land of ice was possible, and theorized about living there one day.

Eren joined in occasionally, asking a question or prompting Armin when he lost his train of thought. For the most part, he seemed content to listen as Armin grew more and more excited, and his eyes shone with dreams of a bigger world.

He was in the middle of talking to Eren about the fields of sand when he heard a noise from outside. It sounded like a scream, so he scrambled up and ran to the window. Eren followed him at a much slower pace.

It was dark outside, so Armin couldn't see much, but what he did see was definitely out of place. Trainees were forbidden from starting fires, much less large bonfires like this. Armin squinted, wondering if he could recognize some of the blurry silhouettes around the fire. Judging from the noise, most of the cadets seemed to be crowding around the bonfire, and it didn't look like the instructors had caught on yet. It almost looked like someone was dangling another person over the fire, but it was too far away for him to see it properly. Some of the silhouettes closest to the fire looked like the boys that cut Armin's hair, and he wondered if it was them that started it.

There was a scream, and Armin noticed one silhouette nearest the fire. It looked like a big muscular cadet was being pushed almost into the fire by another, slimmer one. For a second Armin thought he saw the silhouette of a scarf flapping in the wind, but dismissed it as a trick of the light. Mikasa was in her dorm, that's what she had told him, right?

"Eren, there's something happening outside!"

"Yeah I see it. There's no point going out there, we'll only get in trouble when the instructors arrive. C'mon back to bed. Tell me about these animals that can survive in sand."

Reluctantly, Armin stepped away from the window. He was concerned at the thought of the bullies picking on another target, especially if fire was involved, but he was also too drained to confront them about it. Soon, he was happily telling Eren about lizards and jackrabbits.

Together, they drifted off to sleep, dreaming of the outside world.

Armin was prepared for the stares he would receive the next morning, but something seemed…off. They weren't staring at him in horror or pity. Most people looked apprehensive, while some seemed downright scared. He didn't get it.

He was so busy puzzling over their strange reaction that he didn't notice the breakfast hall grow quiet until it was too late. Towering over him were his six tormentors, one of which had a nasty looking burn on his face. Armin recognized him as the guy who had been holding the scissors. Apparently they'd also been involved in the fire last night, and it looked like one of their victims had put up a fight.

Armin braced himself for whatever would happen next, more insults, maybe some snide comment about his hair. Instead, all of them knelt down on the floor and bowed.

"We're sorry!"

Armin stared at them. The silence in the room was deafening, you could have heard a pin drop as everyone strained to hear his reply.

"…what."

The one with the burnt face pushed off the floor, and only now Armin noticed the pure fear in his eyes.

"We're all dropping out today, but before we go we wanted to apologize. What we did was wrong, and I promise that no one is going to do anything like that to you again."

"But why? What made you change-"

They had already scurried off, and soft murmurs began around the hall as everyone discussed what had just happened.

Except for two people.

Armin's eyes narrowed as Eren calmly sipped his drink while Mikasa nibbled on a bread roll. Both of them were very casually not paying attention to the scene that had just happened. He stormed over to them, sitting down with a thump and glaring at them.

Eren raised an eyebrow at him.

"You suck." Armin growled.

"I was with you all night." he pointed out.

"I _know_ this was a team effort." he snapped, pointing his finger at Mikasa.

She took another bite out of her roll, while Eren reached over and stole her drink.

"You guys are the worst." he groaned, letting his head hit the table.

"No idea what you're talking about." Eren replied.

"Nice weather we're having." Mikasa added.

Armin rolled his eyes at that, but when he sat up his eyes had softened.

"Thank you. You didn't need to do it, but thank you."

"You don't need to thank us, because we didn't do anything."

"Or at least, there's no proof that we did." Mikasa smirked as she stole her drink back from Eren.

"You know what? I'm not going to ask, because I really don't want to know." Armin decided. "So, while you guys were busy trying to avenge my dignity or whatever, did you remember to do the theory homework?"

Two sets of widened eyes made him laugh, and suddenly everything felt a lot lighter. He reached over to grab Eren's roll, and soon the three of them were stealing and swapping their breakfasts.

Armin never found out what exactly had gone down at that bonfire, but needless to say, no one tried to bully him for the rest of his time as a trainee.


End file.
